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[NASA] A Moonlit Earth as Seen From Artemis II

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Earth Observatory
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  3. A Moonlit Earth as Seen From…
 
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April 2, 2026

One of the first images transmitted back to Earth from the

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mission was a stunner. In a single image, Earth’s full disk appears amid celestial phenomena that illustrate its place in the solar system. And although the visible hemisphere appears to be awash in sunlight, it is actually lit by moonlight. The astronauts’ vantage point provided a rare opportunity to capture nighttime features—most notably lights from human habitation—from a new perspective.

An Artemis crew member captured the photo from the Orion spacecraft after it completed the

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, which sent the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a trajectory toward the Moon. In the photo, Earth eclipses the Sun from Orion’s perspective, leaving only a small sliver of its bright light visible around the bottom right edge. Green auroras, caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth’s upper atmosphere, glow around the north and south poles (lower left and upper right, respectively).

The Sun’s light also produces the fuzzy glow, known as

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, that appears to the lower right of Earth. This phenomenon comes from sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust. Skywatchers on Earth may see it at certain times of year around dawn or dusk as a faint column of light extending up from the horizon. Data collected by NASA’s
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spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter suggest that
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of the dust particles that produce zodiacal light. Earth’s other planetary neighbor, Venus, appears as the bright object in the bottom right of the image.

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April 2, 2026

On Earth itself, city lights are evidence of human activity. Bright areas appear in Spain, Portugal, and northern Africa (lower left), sub-Saharan Africa (center left), and Brazil (center right). Digital camera technology—with help from the illumination of a full Moon—made it possible to see these and other details of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in low light. The crew set the camera’s

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to 51,200 to make it highly sensitive to light. For comparison, an ISO setting of 100 or 200 is common for daytime photography.

Previous nighttime views of Earth taken from spacecraft may look very different from this photo but have also inspired and enlightened. For instance, the Apollo 12 crew photographed

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in 1969; astronaut Alan Bean would go on to depict
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of the event in
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.

More recently, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have photographed the planet at night from low Earth orbit, while NASA’s

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nighttime lights product suite uses satellite observations to produce science-quality records of nighttime lights at daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. Those programs provide sustained data records, while the Artemis II photo is distinctive as a single human-captured full-disk view showing many low-light features at once.

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, senior exploration scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was working in the
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during the Artemis II mission and was one of the first people on Earth to see the image. Evans was struck both by its beauty and the perspective revealed by all the visible solar system features. “I love the image so much because it was taken with Earth in moonshine, and shows Earth as a solar system body, a dynamic planet interacting with the solar wind, and a place harboring life,” she said.

The image is scientifically valuable, as well, said

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, Deputy Director for Atmospheres and Data Systems at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It speaks powerfully to the breadth of what NASA does across science and human exploration,” he said. Román studies artificial light at night, as viewed from space, as a
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of human activity.

“[This photo] reminds us that Earth at night is visually compelling, physically complex, and scientifically underexplored,” Román said. “I see this image as a glimpse of what Earth science can become in the future.”

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prepared for Earth Observatory by Lauren Dauphin. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

  • NASA (2026, April 22)
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    . Accessed June 2, 2026.
  • NASA (2026, April 3)
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    . Accessed June 2, 2026.
  • NASA (2006, October 9)
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    . Accessed June 2, 2026.
  • NASA Earth Observatory (2026, May 15)
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    . Accessed June 2, 2026.
  • NASA Image and Video Library (2026, April 3)
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    . Accessed June 2, 2026.

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